1945 Kodak 35RF!!!

Originally Posted by BrianL

Kodak made or imported some really nice cameras. Interesting unorthodox designs seemed to be there thing. 1 of the nicer cameras I had early on was the Pony 135. Simple, very basic engineering with a very decent lens for its time. By today's standards a bit soft and not as contrasty as newer but, really yielded nice results. The lens retracted so it would fit in a pocket. In my home town the news photgraphers turned in their Speed Graphics and were using them.

Wait they went from 4x5's to 35mm's? That's quite a shift... Was this common?

A lot of cameras were ugly back then. Dig around a bit and you'll see the Germans and Japanese made some abominations too. I think Kodak made the RF35 ugly on purpose because they learned that customers liked the "scientific" look of the Argus C3.

Some went first to medium format TLRs, but most jumped at the chance to use something that was a lot more portable.

Matt

“Photography is a complex and fluid medium, and its many factors are not applied in simple sequence. Rather, the process may be likened to the art of the juggler in keeping many balls in the air at one time!”

Ansel Adams, from the introduction to The Negative - The New Ansel Adams Photography Series / Book 2

4 x 5 detail was essentially wasted in the process used to put the photographs on to newsprint - have you ever looked closely at the half-tones used in old newsprint photos .

As 35mm cameras and lenses and systems became common, and 35mm film was improved, the smaller format was quickly recognized as being much more appropriate for deadline sensitive work.

Matt

“Photography is a complex and fluid medium, and its many factors are not applied in simple sequence. Rather, the process may be likened to the art of the juggler in keeping many balls in the air at one time!”

Ansel Adams, from the introduction to The Negative - The New Ansel Adams Photography Series / Book 2

1945 Kodak 35RF!!!

4 x 5 detail was essentially wasted in the process used to put the photographs on to newsprint - have you ever looked closely at the half-tones used in old newsprint photos .

As 35mm cameras and lenses and systems became common, and 35mm film was improved, the smaller format was quickly recognized as being much more appropriate for deadline sensitive work.

All news print to me is really "grainy" ya know the dpi is really low, and dots themselves are large, so being that I'm 30 I never lived through the 4x5 press camera era so I just assumed the 4x5 image was a common size for newspapers of the past and it was sort of a "contact" style print. I've never actually seen an old paper from like the 50's or earlier. Not sure I could even find microfiche anymore none of the libraries even have those machines anymore. Wonder where it all went...